University of South Wales DSpacehttp://dspace1.isd.glam.ac.uk:80/dspace
The DSpace digital repository system captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and distributes digital research material.Tue, 31 Mar 2015 06:21:52 GMT2015-03-31T06:21:52ZHeat of hydration of Portland Cement-Metakaolin-Fly ash (PC-MK-PFA) blendshttp://dspace1.isd.glam.ac.uk:80/dspace/handle/10265/751
Title: Heat of hydration of Portland Cement-Metakaolin-Fly ash (PC-MK-PFA) blends
Authors: Snelson, David. G
Abstract: In the present study two pozzolanic materials are used, Metakaolin (MK) and Fly Ash (PFA), as binary and ternary partial replacement binders with Portland cement (PC) to investigate their effect on the rate of heat evolution (dQ/dt in J/gh) during hydration, and the heat of hydration, (Q(t) in J/g). For binary PC–PFA blends PC hydration is enhanced in the very early stages of hydration, but at extended periods (up to 120 h) an increase in PFA replacement level causes a systematic reduction in heat output. For binary PC–MK blends the results suggest that the MK initially diminishes PC hydration but the subsequent pozzolanic reaction of MK increasingly contributes to the heat output causing some blends to exceed the heat output of the PC control. For both systems a principal controlling factor in the PC hydration rate (and the heat evolution rate) is the water requirement of the pozzolan, but for PC–MK blends the pozzolanic reaction of the MK makes a significant contribution to the heat output. However this reaction is controlled both by the availability of water and the supply of Ca2+ ions from the hydrating PC which introduces an increasing level of complexity to the heat output versus time profiles. When combining MK and PFA in ternary PC–MK–PFA blends the MK has a dominant influence on the heat output versus time profiles.Fri, 27 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMThttp://dspace1.isd.glam.ac.uk:80/dspace/handle/10265/7512015-03-27T00:00:00ZRewriting the nation: a comparative study of Welsh and Scottish women's fiction from the wilderness years to post-devolutionhttp://dspace1.isd.glam.ac.uk:80/dspace/handle/10265/750
Title: Rewriting the nation: a comparative study of Welsh and Scottish women's fiction from the wilderness years to post-devolution
Authors: Rosalyn Mary Marron
Abstract: Since devolution there has been a wealth of stimulating and exciting literary works by Welsh and Scottish women writers, produced as the boundaries of nationality were being dismantled and ideas of nationhood transformed. This comparative study brings together, for the first time, Scottish and Welsh women writers’ literary responses to these historic political and cultural developments.
Chapter one situates the thesis in a historical context and discusses some of the connections between Wales and Scotland in terms of their relationship with ‘Britain’ and England. Chapter two focuses on the theoretical context and argues that postcolonial and feminist theories are the most appropriate frameworks in which to understand both Welsh and Scottish women’s writing in English, and their preoccupations with gendered inequalities and language during the pre- and post-devolutionary period. The third chapter examines Welsh and Scottish women’s writing from the first failed referendum (1979) to the second successful one (1997) to provide a sense of progression towards devolution. Since the process of devolution began there has been an important repositioning of Scottish and Welsh people’s perception of their culture and their place within it; the subsequent chapters – four, five, six and seven – analyse a diverse body of work from the symbolic transference of powers in 1999 to 2008. The writers discussed range from established authors such as Stevie Davies to first-time novelists such as Leela Soma. Through close comparative readings focusing on a range of issues such as marginalised identities and the politics of home and belonging, these chapters uncover and assess Welsh and Scottish women writers’ shared literary assertions, strategies and concerns as well as local and national differences.
The conclusions drawn from this thesis suggest that, as a consequence of a history of sustained internal and external marginalization, post-devolution Welsh and Scottish women’s writing share important similarities regarding the politics of representation. The authors discussed in this study are resisting writers who textually illustrate the necessity of constantly rewriting national narratives and in so doing enable their audience to read the two nations and their peoples in fresh, innovative and divergent ways.Wed, 11 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMThttp://dspace1.isd.glam.ac.uk:80/dspace/handle/10265/7502015-03-11T00:00:00ZTowards a philosophy of theatre inspired by Aristotle’s poetics and post-structuralist aesthetics in relation to three South African playshttp://dspace1.isd.glam.ac.uk:80/dspace/handle/10265/749
Title: Towards a philosophy of theatre inspired by Aristotle’s poetics and post-structuralist aesthetics in relation to three South African plays
Authors: Michael, Picardie
Abstract: I have attempted a reading of Aristotle in terms of mimesis, ethos, mythos, lexis,
hamartia, anagnorisis, peripeteia, catharsis and anamnesis - as an existential “being there” (Dasein) of the characters’ freedom and actual historicity - in three of my
plays in which I performed or witnessed in productions in England, Wales, three
Scandinavian countries, the U.S. and South Africa. I have analysed other Southern
African “womanist” performative drama and feminist theatre. I assume with the
ancient Greeks that in serious theatre there is theoria, an educated, discursive looking,
which involves a dialectics of logos in dianoia intertwined in the mythos – ethical
truth in the discourse of the plot. Whilst aesthetics cannot be reduced to psychobiography, creative writing is motivated in part by the author’s and the dramatic subjects’ psychoanalytically understood personal and political unconscious placed in the ethos – the character on the stage. The aesthetics of tragedy relate to both peripeteia (reversals) and anagnorisis (recognition of responsibility) which occur within an arc of development, crisis and denouement of the vicissitudes of purported wisdom in understanding how performative drama and critical theatre have been
presented in what has become known as The Struggle in a post-apartheid South
Africa and post-colonial Zimbabwe by comparison with historical conditions in South America, India, even China. The values of nous, phronesis and sophia, intuitive,
practical and interpretative wisdom are connected to the Nicomachean and Eudemian
Ethics with which the tragic-comic hero and his Other are imbued or violate. The
post-structuralist aesthetic as developed in the literary theory of the twentieth century
is essentially the interaction of synchronic and diachronic language emerging from
the signifiance and the semiosis of the chora (the feminine or maternal unconscious)
within the de-familarisation techniques of Russian and Czech Formalism. This
provides a creative and meaningful limit to a consciousness of being-white and beingblack-
in-the-world against disempowering Nothingness or perceived Otherness
threatening moral beings. Nothingness and the Other are characterised magically and
as witch-craft in oral-cultures which deny the unconscious and resort to paranoia and
persecution of Otherness in the subject projected onto the other – the “colonial
personality”. Shades of Brown has been re-written as Jannie Veldsman – A Film
8
Scenario and I have incorporated into a revised The Cape Orchard a retrospective
anticipation of the coming of the new South Africa. I reflect on what tragic drama on
the stage and in real life in South Africa means now that the new South Africa is over
its honeymoon period and faces serious problems of failed governance. Within the
dialectic of an enlightened rabbinical morality of Hillel the Elder (“What is hateful to
you do not do to others….” and “If I am not for myself who will be for me…?”) and
Kant’s categorical imperative of human beings as a priori ends, I follow the fortunes
of an old Jewish veteran of The Struggle, dating back to the Defiance Campaign of
1952/3. Fugard’s work is exemplary in fostering a sense of Sartre’s Nothingness and
nihilation which “haunts” Being and is the space of undecidability in relation to my
condition of freedom allowing the transcendence of Being. Being asserts reparation
and redemption in the face of the depressive and paranoid subject/object split in the
subject’s being-in-the-world. Plays ideally submerge this existentialist,
psychoanalytic and Aristotelian dramaturgy in the form of Kierkegaard’s faith and
Nietzsche’s will which are part of the Encompassing in Karl Jasper’s metaphysics -
the residue of a Judaeo-Christian ethics facing the anomie and aporia of the postmodern.
The new South Africa was only ostensibly built on Greek and Judaeo-
Christian secular ethics – “truth and reconciliation”. It inherited state, revolutionary
and criminal violence, as well as a sophisticated economic infrastructure, masspoverty
and a segregated educational, social and welfare system which in the milieu
of ANC incompetence and corruption have for the very poor got worse but to the
benefit of a new African oligarchy, the beneficiaries of a dysfunctional affirmative
action policy. What is to be done? Irigaray’s striking metaphor “the speculum of the
Other woman” suggests that we are reflected by the instrument we use for
investigating what may be Other to us: “we” are westerners trying to live in Africa.
“We” are Other – not as autochthonous as the African majority. But the
autochthonous can also behave as Other and may even fail to recognise the Other in
themselves. Franz Fanon’s “colonial personality”, like ex-president Thabo Mbeki,
misunderstands the colonial Other in himself which, disastrously, he projects and
attacks in the imaginary and persecutory Other, only to suffer the return of the Real,
as do the dramatic fictions Van Tonder in Shades of Brown, Dianne Cupido in The
Cape Orchard and Harry Grossman the old man’s son in The Zulu and the Zeide
(inspired by a short story by Dan Jacobson).
9
The Russian and Czech Formalists and Structuralists show us how to foreground the
Real through techniques of de-familiarisation which can be applied to modernist and
post-modernist “womanist” performance drama and feminist theatre. Defamilarisation,
especially in an Africa struggling between failed and successful
colonialism and often ruled by more or less corrupt elites, sensitizes us to a moral
nihilism which characterises the failed African state - described by Conrad as a “heart
of darkness” transcended in aletheia – being oneself in the self-showing light of one’s
ethos operating through a personal and political unconscious mystified in the rhetoric
of oral-cultures. Playwrights such as Yael Farber, Fraser Grace, Aletta Bezuidenhout
and Fatima Dike express a semiosis of the unconscious and the signifiance and
“absurdity” of logos suggesting that all is not lost in post-apartheid Southern Africa as
regards human values, whilst struggling with the political correctness demanded in
The Struggle. A partially successful colonialism in parts of Africa could within a
British education system, produce a Wole Soyinka who transcends the propaganda of
agit-prop by showing the parabolic arc of tragedy afflicted with peripeteia. The
weight of African backwardness is not only the negative heritage of colonialism and
slavery but Africa’s immersion in traditional partially modernised, but still
patriarchal, often tribally and religiously split oral-cultures. These enable the colonial
personality to unconsciously or opportunistically exploit his paranoiac sense of his
victimage at the expense of the writing-cultures of development which entail
anamnesis and the redemption through anagnorisis.Sun, 08 Jun 2014 23:00:00 GMThttp://dspace1.isd.glam.ac.uk:80/dspace/handle/10265/7492014-06-08T23:00:00ZValues, diversity and the justification of EU institutionshttp://dspace1.isd.glam.ac.uk:80/dspace/handle/10265/748
Title: Values, diversity and the justification of EU institutions
Authors: Calder, Gideon
Abstract: Liberal theories of justice typically claim that political institutions should be justifiable to those who live under them – whatever their values. The more such values diverge, the greater the challenge of justifiability. Diversity of this kind becomes especially pronounced when the institutions in question are supranational. Focusing on the case of the European Union, this article aims to address a basic question: what kinds of values should inform the justification of political institutions facing a plurality of value systems? One route to an answer is provided by John Rawls, who famously distinguishes between comprehensive and political values, and defends the exclusion of the former from the foundations of a political theory of justice. This article questions the tenability of the Rawlsian solution, and draws attention to an alternative twofold conceptual distinction: that between minimal and non-minimal and between substantive and procedural values. Minimal values are meant to be as independent as possible of controversial conceptions of the good and views of the world, regardless of whether these are comprehensive or purely political. It will be argued that their endorsement may thus further specify the nature of what should be shared in order to justify political institutions in conditions of pluralism. In order to refine further the account of such a basis of justification, two variants of minimalism will be presented according to whether they invest substantive or procedural values. Substantive values qualify the property of an outcome; procedural values qualify the property of a procedure. The latter part of the article consists of a ‘face-off’ between minimal proceduralism and minimal substantivism, considering reasons in favour of the adoption of each. The result, we suggest, is a helpful reorientation of the political dimension of the value debates to which the multiplicity of values amid contemporary European horizons give rise.Sun, 11 May 2014 23:00:00 GMThttp://dspace1.isd.glam.ac.uk:80/dspace/handle/10265/7482014-05-11T23:00:00Z